


When the Good Man's Gone, the Villain Will Do

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Meraad Astaarit, Meraad Itwasit, Tamassran Aqun [3]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Confrontations, Corypheus Being an Asshole, Destruction, Dragon Age Quest: In Your Heart Shall Burn, Drama, Enemies to Friends, Escape, Eventual Romance, F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, Head Injury, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inquisitor Backstory, POV Minor Character, Qunari, Qunari Culture and Customs, References to Depression, Second Chances, Sharing Body Heat, Suicidal Thoughts, Trust, Unintentional Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 09:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12627684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: ~This has certainly been an eventful night. Far, far too eventful for a tired old man who still cannot help occasionally thinking to himself that, really, he would much rather be dead than linger on pointlessly in this cold, cruel world that is destined to soon be consumed by a raging storm anyway~As Haven burns around her and the Inquisition has already escaped to safety, Issala Adaar, a former Tamassran now hailed as the Herald, has to survive the showdown with Corypheus and make her own way out of these devastated ruins. During her escape, she has rather unexpected company: the man who would once have sacrificed her, and the whole world, to the very monster they are fleeing. Not the most fitting company for a good woman like her - for he himself is far from being a good man - but he will have to do.





	When the Good Man's Gone, the Villain Will Do

This has certainly been an eventful night. Far, far too eventful for a tired old man who still cannot help occasionally thinking to himself that, really, he would much rather be dead than linger on pointlessly in this cold, cruel world that is destined to soon be consumed by a raging storm anyway.   
  
He has even gotten to witness the first inklings of that storm - because his oh so very magnanimous captor pulled him out of oblivion when he tried to turn his own ice magic on himself in his prison cell, and saw to it that he was healed and wrapped in a ridiculous quantity of blankets and kept alive long enough to see the moment when it all went down.  
  
When the Inquisition forces - their ranks bolstered now by the southern mages that he has quite embarrassingly lost to the Herald and her bizarre team of misfits - returned from an expedition to close the Breach, a celebration was thrown together to laud them for their success. Quite a typical southern festival, he imagines, with a lot of consumption of badly distilled liquor and simple dancing that looked more like a series of leaps on a single spot (or, sometimes, for more variety, along a circular pattern).   
  
In a fit of unfathomable generosity, the Herald had him taken out of the damp, draughty dungeons beneath the Chantry into the no less damp and draughty outdoors, so that he could warm himself by one of the bonfires, and even have some (admittedly quite decent, even if lamentably devoid of cinnamon) pie to eat. A bit of a challenging task, that, what with a the movements of his hands being limited by a short chain stretched out between a pair of cuffs; but he still helped himself as best he could, if only for the sake of making the Herald - Issala - smile as she watched him munch and swallow and instinctively search around for a napkin. Which, of course, there wasn't - a fact that made both of them exchange an embarrassed chuckle.  
  
Not that... Not that there is anything special about her smile, or any of that chuckling nonsense. He tried to prevent her birth, after all; he told her flat in the face that she should never have existed! Not to mention that she disrupted the plans he had for the mages, and topped all of her infuriating meddling with closing the Breach - thus ruining any chance he had to save his boy, either by being a faithful servant to the Elder One and receiving the reward promised to him, or by making use of disruptions in the Veil and turning time even further back, many, many months back, to those ill-fated Satinalia holidays when the darkspawn burst out of the ground and tore his amata apart, and poisoned his boy with their black blood, and he wasn't even there...  
  
She is his enemy, by all accounts - but a merciful one. One that understands.   
  
He knows her story, having briefly crossed paths with her, long before she was the Herald, a giant of an ox... woman walking with an assured, gliding gait among the fitfully trembling, superstitious southern Andrastians that are ready to worship her as a goddess (and her... stature certainly allows for it).   
  
He knows that she was raised under the Qun and trained for some years to be the caretaker and advisor of young children, what her kind calls a Tamassran. She eventually became one, and perhaps even excelled at that role for a time (she is the type to do that)... Until her favourite student, a girl from what he remembers, started displaying signs of magic - which, in the society of those horned barbarians, meant that the child needed to have her mouth sewn shut, 'to prevent her from spreading demonic corruption', and was doomed to spend the rest of her days with heavy, suffocating shackles round her neck and wrists, with a control rod always raised over her, ready to sear her flesh with a shock charge whenever she stepped out of line.  
  
He has known colleagues of his that bought similar toys off dwarven merchants or travellers returning from the war zone, to use them on overly mouthy slaves; that's the very last thing a sensible parent (or parental figure) would want near their child, so it's small wonder to him that the prospect of such a bleak future for the girl made her Tamassran wake up from years' worth of brainwashing, and rise against the other Qunari... Thus turning from Tamassran to Issala, 'Dust' in the language of the oxmen: a broken, purposeless exile who sacrificed everything to save a child that ended up dying anyway.  
  
And now he suspects that she looks upon him the same way; he, too, is 'Issala' to her... And he can't argue with that. He is still going to crumble away, outwitted and thwarted at every turn, rejected by his homeland, no doubt resented by his master, and completely alone.  
  
But before he does waste into nothing, dissipating into dust in the wind, where is the harm in huddling in the warmth of a fire, a slice of cinnamon-less pie in his lap, far away enough from the crowd of revellers in order not to draw unnecessary attention, but still close enough to make out a massive figure of another Qunari, standing between poor Dorian and some drunken villagers that were jeering at him... Where is the harm in forcing a tiny crooked smile when he looked up at the Herald from his pie plate - a silent sign of recognition from one Issala to another? Where is the harm in basking in this inexplicable sensation of calm that comes over him whenever she is near, so strong and intimidating and yet so gentle to those in need of being soothed - from a tiny whimpering refugee child to a weary old former magister?  
  
So he reasoned, and so he acted - getting to actually enjoy a few moments of... not peace exactly, but less stifling bitterness than usual. Until the darkness beyond the sharpened fence encircling Haven  - proper, velvety nocturnal darkness rather than the angry green blaze of the Breach that would once sizzle and coil after sunset in the southern skies - suddenly became peppered with countless red-gold dots, too close to the ground to be stars, and growing closer still, with every passing moment; closer and larger, stretching out from dots into drop-like shapes, as though the mountainside was bleeding with liquid flame. Torches - carried by columns upon columns of armoured warriors, the reflections of the flame tongues twisting into ghostly red likenesses of open wounds across their steel-clad chests.  
  
Soon, the scouts came racing along, wild-eyed and out of breath, with a jumbled report of a vast, obviously hostile force approaching, no banner in sight, headed by a pale, dark-haired man in black armour with glowing red crystals wrought into it, and an enormous creature, some eight feet tall, all exposed bones and rotting flesh that hardened into the same red shards, dark like congealed blood and pulsing with a feverish, raw heartbeat.  
  
And that was when he was idiotic enough to allow himself to get overcome by a pang of mindless terror, which sank, like a long barbed lance, into his chest and then further up his throat and into his brain... Because Maker, he had been reminding himself all this time that this was going to happen - but not so soon... Not so suddenly! Not when he was least ready... Not when the wish to die had momentarily slipped into the back of his mind!  
  
Staggering to his feet, the empty pie plate flying off into nothingness, cold sweat plastering its invisible clammy fingers all over his temples and throat, he gasped hoarsely, like some crazed pot-banging pauper standing in the middle of the street and proclaiming the end of the world,  
  
'That's him! That's the Elder One! He has come for us all!'  
  
A stupid, stupid thing to do.   
  
He was too blinded by visions of chaos consuming everything around him, and of those long black claws ripping into his chest, scraping against his still madly drumming heart, drawing out the punishment for his failure. And because of this, he did not have enough sense to keep his gaping mouth shut, so a few of the villagers managed to hear him, and turned on him, the volatile mix of drunkenness and confusion turning them into a herd of mindless, stampeding creatures that could easily trample him over.   
  
Especially since the guards that had been keeping an eye on him (and would have supposedly ushered him back to the relative safety of the prison) had rushed off to defend the village. And Issala, too, had been called away by her military commander, and so he had no strong and stern Qunari to stand like a shielding dam between him and the mob, like that other oxman had done for Dorian.  
  
'It was him!' someone screamed. 'The Vint! He brought these... things here! He must have told them to attack us... With his evil magic! He can do that! I was in Redcliffe when he kicked our Arl out! That's why I joined up! To kill the likes of him! For Andraste!'  
  
'For Andraste!' about a dozen more voices roared - and soon the air turned into a crushing whirlwind of pounding fists and flying bottles.   
  
Even with manacles cutting deep into his wrists and a tight chain not letting him draw his hands too far apart, he may have managed to squeeze out a few spells to defend himself, out of unexpectedly awakened instinct more than anything else (and if the southerners had not confiscated his gauntlets as a potential weapon, he may have swatted at a few ruddy, distorted screaming faces with the ornamental spikes, like an extremely outraged cat). But there were just too many of them, pressing upon him from all directions, piling up on top of him and trying to poke and strike and tear at every inch of him within their reach. It was only the sound of the horns and the commander's urgent call for an evacuation made them fall back, leaving him with a broken, clogged-up nose, a soft warm chunk of flesh dangling off his lip, a sore spot over his rib cage that was promising to swell into a nasty bruise, several more, smaller bruises all along his arms, and blood oozing from a gash in his forehead and making his eyelids stick together.  
  
It took him a while to fully come to his senses, biting off and spitting out the lip chunk and awkwardly twisting his bound hands to cast some healing magic over at least a few of the more superficial wounds. Good thing that the Inquisition, perhaps seeing how readily he had submitted, had not bothered to ask some Dwarven craftsmen to work magic suppressors into his shackles; and later on, after his little self-destructive escapade, they must have simply been too pressed for time, in too much of a rush to close the Breach, to rectify that oversight.  
  
When he patched himself up and recovered his bearings, he saw that Haven was burning.   
  
The Elder One must have unleashed the dragon that would so often accompany him: for there was a winged shadow gliding across the sky, the lower reaches of which had now turned into a stream of molten gold, bubbling and splashing against the thatched roofs of the little village homes, until they melted away, their brittle black carcasses slowly floating off on the blazing waves.   
  
And with it, this scorching tide carried the Red Templars.   
  
He had not come into a lot of contact with them: the division of the Venatori that he had been assigned to was given orders to capture the rebel mages, lure the Herald into a trap, and contribute to the Oculara initiative while they were at it (something that he was not entirely thrilled about; he had gone out of his way to let those empty-eyed 'Tranquil' wretches see that they were not welcome in Redcliffe, to get them to leave the village, doing everything short of actually yelling at them 'If you linger, we will have to kill you!'). The red lyrium operation had been somewhere out there, a vaguely defined part of the Elder One's grand scheme - and finally seeing its results up close was not the most pleasant of experiences.   
  
Deformed almost beyond all semblance of humanity, like giant figures melted shoddily out crimson glass, the lyrium warriors crushed through the last remnants of the charred walls, churning the air with the jagged red spikes that protruded out of what once had been their sword arms (their weapons must have turned into an extension of living flesh at some point, fused together with the hands that held them by chunks of corrupted crystal). Every and any screaming villager that had the misfortune of stumbling into their path was promptly dealt with: one moment the silhouette of a Templar would reel against the blinding inferno, a wriggling worm-like mass of flesh pinned onto the gnarled crystalline lance; and, one scream and squelch later, the ripped-up corpse would be tossed aside, and the monstrous raiders would lumber on in search of a new victim.  
  
Eventually, they came for him as well, not hindered for long by his attempts to back away into the shelter of the few solid structures that were still standing. Perhaps they did not recognize the Venatori robe in the grimy rags his time in the dungeons had swiftly turned his clothes into; or perhaps they despised him as a traitor; or perhaps they simply did not have enough sentience left in their bulbous glazed skulls to tell him apart from the southerners... Either way, so very soon after almost being beaten into a pulp by a village mob, he now risked the same fate at the hands (or grotesque approximation thereof) of the Red Templars. Part of him wanted to just relax all muscles in his aching body, hang his head meekly and let them do what they willed with him - but apparently, that pesky bestial urge for self-preservation proved stronger, and he kept trying to shield himself instead.  
  
And again, he only avoided a tragic (no, not really) demise by sheer accident: when one of the corrupted warriors took a swing at him, his fumbling attempt to dodge actually worked, and instead of hitting him, the red lyrium lance caught against the chain between his hands, causing him to whoosh a few inches up into the air, his heart crumpling up, like a bit of paper tossed into a waste bin, and plummeting all the way down to his left heel. The Templar twirled him in the air for a while, the hardened crystal grinding against the chain, until the point when the lyrium must have hit the chain's weakest link, making it snap.   
  
Hurtled off into nothingness, he made a far softer landing than he had braced himself for: there was a bale of straw that had not yet caught fire somewhere behind the local tavern, and he plopped straight into its middle, with a deafening dry rustle. The flames were fast encroaching, however, so he scrambled to his feet, spitting out the little bits of chaff, or whatever it was called, and limped a few paces to the side.   
  
As he did that, he found himself staring into a huge splintered gap in the tavern wall, through which a band of Red Templars (they must have been the ones who'd damaged this quaint work of southern architecture by chopping their way through) could be clearly seen, encircling some unfortunate young woman - the publican perhaps? - that had gotten trapped underneath a slanted pile of wood planks. He froze for a few seconds, not knowing which way to turn - and then, raised his hands, each fist full of whirring lightning, and rushed inside through the hole.  
  
He will be damned (or rather, more damned than he already is) if he knows why he did this. Tossing himself into danger, risking his life to selflessly rescue some random peasant  - who may have been part of the mob that had ganged up on him - this is what a good man would have done. But he is not a good man, has not been for a long time.  
  
If he were a good man, he would fought beside his wife and son during that darkspaen ambush; and, should the darkness still have claimed them, he would have sought other means to save them, resisting the call of the Venatori when they sought him out in Minrathous; he would never have believed his own lies as he tried to justify his atrocities to himself - all this drivel about the good of Tevinter, the good of his own family. If he were a good man, he would never have arrived at this disgraceful low point. Never.  
  
And there really was no sense in suddenly turning to the path of good amid the blazing wreckage of Haven. For there are only two people in the whole of Thedas who would have cared enough to be disappointed over his loss of... goodness, and whose disappointment might have spurred him on to atone for all he's done, even by doing meaningless little things like protecting southern plebeians. But one of these people was dying, let down by the very man who was supposed to protect him, and the other, his former apprentice, his former friend, had to be disgusted by what he had become, and what he would have wrought in that alternative future - disgusted beyond all forgiveness. While the third... No, no, there was no third; why would he care about disappointing his enemy? Is that not the whole point of being enemies?  
  
But regardless - what is done is done. He did save that woman.   
  
He did step into the tavern, passing through the veils of smoke (which was not nearly as majestic as it sounds in retelling, because he was coughing barkingly the whole time).   
  
He did unleash a miniature lightning storm, which bit painfully at the red knights through the gaps in their armour, thoroughly frying what little of their flesh that was not yet crusted over with lyrium.   
  
And he did emerge out of that storm victorious, surrounded by motionless deformed corpses, with the terrified little woman clinging on to his arm, her chest heaving frantically and her feet dragging across the floor.  
  
'Thank you... for saving me... Maker bless you, kind stranger...' she spluttered, not even flinching away in that typically southern dread of magic as he tried to heal her.   
  
'Kind stranger' indeed - she had not even registered the shackles on his wrists, utterly failing to figure out that he was the same dread Tevinter the Inquisition had hauled in from Redcliffe.  
  
'Where... Do we go now? Where do we hide?'  
  
'How do I know?' he snapped, not as vehemently and venomously as he had sounded inside his own head: being too preoccupied by making the plebeian stand upright, he had neglected to heal himself, and the smoke was starting to make him sick. 'The Chantry... looks like a defensible building... Try hiding there... Go on... Scurry off... I will... Catch up...'  
  
But he never did.  
  
After the woman trotted off towards the Chantry, he attempted to follow her - but his legs suddenly decided to take a loopy swerve in another direction, entwining ludicrously against one another as if he was drunk. For the next few... vague units of time, he blundered about with little to no sense of where his body was floating off to (though, as it became clear later, his feet had taken him all the way down the road outside of Haven, to where the Inquisition had assembled its siege machinery). He may have even occasionally crawled on all fours, with his temples burning from within and his throat feeling sickly tight all the while.   
  
He did alleviate some of the smoke's effects by blindly casting a healing spell, in hopes that it would, indeed, cleanse his own body and that the hand with the restorative light cupped in it had not detached itself from his limp form and decided to start a life of its own somewhere in the heart of the Frostbacks. But even after that, he kept feeling more than slightly woozy and disoriented - which made it not at all surprising that he had eventually wandered right into the path of a stray arrow.  
  
He has no idea who had fired it: an Inquisition soldier or some Templar archer (those were skittering across the snow like gigantic rats, evidently trying to break down the Inquisition's trebuchets). But regardless of origin, the blasted projectile hit his shoulder like the crudely painted target on a straw dummy.   
  
It did not sink too deep - or else he would have likely bled to death, his misadventures finally coming to an end a little sooner (he should have been so lucky). Still, the impact itself was enough to make him trip over his own feet, falling backwards and thumping his head against something... He thinks it was the top of a large boulder?   
  
And thus, having made a complete fool out of himself (though thankfully, things were too hectic for anyone to notice his dazed manoeuvres), he sank into the snow, his consciousness thinning and blurring like a watercolour image when you add more water to it (an odd comparison to come up with, perhaps, but when he and Felix were trying to understand what non-magical pursuit the boy had the strongest inclination for, his little one did try his hand at painting for a while).   
  
He spent most of the final battle stages in this condition, hidden from view of both the Herald and her comrades, and their bestial, crystal-incased adversaries. Though their voices did break through the fog in his mind occasionally: he thinks he even heard Dorian cry out once,  
  
'Wait - Alexius! Has anyone seen Alexius? He was taken out of his cell for the celbration, wasn't he? Do you know if he made it to the Chantry?'  
  
To which another, deeper voice (perhaps that male Qunari's?) replied gravely,  
  
'I don't think he did. I am pretty sure I would've picked him out of the crowd when Cullen was leading them all off. Guy stands out, you know, 'specially among a bunch of scared villagers. So yeah... I'm sorry'.  
  
'I... I am not really sure if condolences are appropriate here,' Dorian sighed bitterly. 'I suppose the man that I once looked up to died on the same day as his wife. But still... For Felix's sake, I was rather hoping... That he would come out of this alive... that we could... perhaps one day...'  
  
His voice trailed off into another sigh - which, in turn, merged together with Issala's angry whisper,  
  
'It was a bad idea - letting him come outside! Dorian, I do not know what to say... He was your Tamassran... in a way... And I... I caused his death...'  
  
'You are not to blame,' Dorian objected softly. 'You have been nothing if not lenient to him, considering his crimes. If you hadn't let him sit at the party, he would have likely been left behind in the chaos of evacuation, and died anyway. Locked up in that ghastly dungeon. At least this way, he... he...'  
  
'He had some pie,' Issala finished for him, her voice very small now, cracking - and Dorian responded with a brief, hollow laugh, which had the same crack running through it, except even deeper.  
  
The conversation was brought to a conclusion by a third male voice, which exclaimed urgently,  
  
'Hey Sparkler, Artsy - I know this is an important moment, but... We've got another wave of our red lyrium guests coming!'  
  
And then, the battle resumed, the clamour of weapons against the crystal surface and the rumbles and bursts of destructive magic all merging together into a dizzying mess, into a gigantic ball of invisible, hardened twine, which wrapped many times around the pounding head of the man Dorian had called for, as he lay in a snow-powdered crack between two rocks, too weak even to tear his lips apart and make his presence known, to cry out that no, he was not dead, and that, much as his Tevinter pride would have reeled at the admission, he was rather in need of assistance...  
  
All for the best, perhaps - for Dorian had to be right. He had begun to die long ago, together with his Livia. This was just an over-extended agony - and if he was left like this, sick, wounded, forgotten, it would play itself out and culminate in a plunge into the welcoming, soothingly cold darkness.  
  
The plunge did happen, eventually - but it turned out that he had merely lost consciousness. Blast it. Fate has certainly made quite a frustrating habit out of refusing to just let him die.  
  
When he emerged from blackness again, the air was not quite as heavy with smoke any longer, and the fires had begun to simmer down. When he squeezed himself out of whatever hole he had plopped into, Haven lay quiet and abandoned before him  - an ashen wasteland stretching out beneath the breathtakingly tall black dome of the sky, which was powdered with stars like tiny bits of a shattered block of ice.  
  
And in the midst of that desolation, three figures stood, still as statues, two on one side and one of the other, measuring the distance in between with a silent glare. Issala, facing down two adversaries that towered even over her Qunari bulk - and still undeterred by the fact, with her head carried high, the metal sheaths on her horns gleaming in the starlight, her back rigidly straight, and her legs spread wide for a firmer foothold. And opposite her, the Elder One, the dragon at his heel - confronting the insolent survivor of the Temple at long last, on his own, no blundering servants needed to bring her to him.  
  
Unseen by his master, that very servant healed himself as he watched the scene unfold, with a shaky hand, wincing whenever his tagic whooshed and tingled too loudly (both because he was not too keen on being discovered, not when he was so far from his best battle form, and because his head would not stop aching). In his other hand, he had slowly begun to build up a charge of arcane energy, not yet certain who he would use it on.   
  
If he turned on the Herald, would the Elder One forgive him? Accept him back? Help him keep looking for another way to save his son? Would the Herald's death bring him a motivation to live?..   
  
Wait, why was he feeling so frightened, so appalled at the very idea of seizing this chance to crush his enemy once and for all? A good man would have been appalled, yes - but that good man was dead. He was never coming back; he had no reason to! And yet... And yet again, just like during his musings in the cell, in that blanket cocoon Issala had made for him, he was struck a realization that, much as he was supposed to hate her, he did not wish her to die.   
  
She understood him too well; her company brought him too much relief from his pain.  
  
And, after a few moments of blank stupor, he suddenly came to know, deep in his heart, that once the spell was ready, he was going to aim it at his own master.  
  
Which needed to happen as promptly as possible: the Elder One had shed his frozen stillness and approached the Herald in a few sweeping strides, his corruption-warped voice growling an all too familiar command to submit, to kneel, to exalt the new ruler of this gods-forsaken world. She did not kneel, of course - and, snarling in outrage, the Elder One lunged forward, sinking his claws into her wrist, and yanked her off the ground, while the dark-green orb in his free hand began to spit searing red light that he poured forcefully into her Mark, apparently intending to dissolve it, to separate it from the grey Qunari flesh, to smooth out the wrinkle in his perfect plan.  
  
The ordeal was obviously enough to shake even the stoic composure the Qunari are so famed for: even though she barely uttered a sound, Issala's chiselled grey face twisted in a noiselessly screaming grimace that he had never seen before, not even during those 'lectures' held by one of his former students, when the youths from the Circle threw all manner of scalding magical projectiles at the captured Qunari outcast, and he himself - a formally stiff guest of honour watching from the back seat - would linger on after the class had been dismissed, to make certain that the 'test subject' had not been gravely injured... and suddenly found himself learning that the two of them had more in common that he could ever have imagined.  
  
The onslaught of fire bolts thrown about by cackling Tevinter children had barely made her flinch - and yet now, she was gasping for air, her mouth a quivering loop, her eyes protruding out of their sockets, all venous, pinkish-tinted whites. The removal of the Mark may well have killed her - were the Elder One not distracted by the heavy huff of his dragon's breath, as it tilted its deformed head slowly to sniff and snap its jaws at the morsel of flesh in a tattered wrapping, which had boldly (to apply the word loosely) stepped out right in front of its leering maw, the spell finally complete.  
  
What would have been a spectacular burst of vivid purple mage fire was destined to sizzle away into nothing, however - for the Elder One unlocked his grasp of the Herald, tossing her carelessly in the general direction of the nearby trebuchet (the crash of her body against the wood and metal turned out quite forceful, her adorned horns getting lodged in some log or other). His attention diverted away from the Qunari, the Elder One waved impatiently at the dragon to desist, and, twirling dramatically with a soft flap of the long garment that concealed the lower half of his tainted body, loomed over the puny figure of his one-time servant, coiled red lightning dancing in between the black claws of his free hand. A split second later, the coils unfurled into a long, whip-like bolt, which lashed at the puny man's legs below the knees, burning a raw, pulsing gash through his clothes and skin and forcing him to extinguish his own spell and drop down into a pose of reverent worship that pleased his master so much.  
  
'You worthless maggot!' the Elder One roared, adding a new whip burn to the barely healed, still partly bruised flesh.  
  
'You dare crawl out before me?! After such an insulting show of incompetence?! You have long since outlived your usefulness, and soon, I will have dozens of new Blight husks to serve me in the stead of your offspring! If you came to seek forgiveness, you will find none! You will find! Only! Death!'  
  
'Blight husk to serve the Elder One' - that was how he found out, with a burst of pain in his chest that had nothing to do with the bloodied lightning that kept splitting through deeper and deeper layers of his flesh, that his master had never intended to honour their bargain. That the Elder One had never truly meant to heal Felix, instead keeping him close for some hidden purpose of his own, and viewed them both as expendable, easily discarded tools; that the same had to be applicable to all those other fools who have joined the cause in hopes of rousing the Tevinter Imperium from its knees.  
  
He was right to think like a good man and resist the temptation of attacking the Herald... Though he suspects that he would not have raised a hand against her either way. He would have been unable to.   
  
And he even mumbled something of the sort, plastered on all fours, shuddering at every new crack of the lightning whip and glaring at his raging master's towering, seemingly faceless form through a misty, watery pall that had been cast over his eyes both by physical torment and the mounting anger that was beginning to bubble in his chest. Anger at the creature before him, for tricking him - and at himself, too (well, being angry at himself is one of his top current moods, up there with being numb and indifferent to what is going to happen to him next, screaming internally after each agonizing reminder that he will never hold his wife in his arms again or see his son's shy soft smile, getting sick with overwhelming weariness, and wondering why on earth he would sometimes get so fixated on the Herald's eye and hair colour).  
  
'I... Crawled out... To help... The Herald...' he croaked through tightly ground teeth - and the response he got from Issala, much to his surprise (and also... something akin to... joy?) was a hoarse but enthusiastic 'THANK YOU!', which she bellowed while leaping off the trebuchet, a chunk of wood still stuck to her horns.  
  
As it turned out, while the Elder One was unleashing his wrath on the 'worthless and incompetent maggot', Issala had wasted little time in jerking herself free and whacking at the mechanism with her blade, which had set off the trebuchet, calibrated to point at the snowy mountainside and cause an avalanche when fired.  
  
In a blinking of a (still very bleary, in his case) eye, the mass of solid dark rock rising above Haven sank into a tide of white and grey and icy blue, which rushed down the mountain at an ever growing speed, picking up more and more heavy lumps of snow, which must have been the size of a house each, and snapping the thick trunks of the solitary fir trees like flimsy little toothpicks.  
  
A magnificent sight, in a way - inspiring a sort of breathless awe at the sheer scope and inevitability of destruction. He did not get to gape at it for too long, though, as Issala pulled him up off the ground and tumbled together with him down yet another hole, which went far deeper this time, straight into a maze of ancient tunnels that apparently were twisting underneath the entire village and had been partially exposed by the rumbles of the raging dragon fire and the avalanche. Too bad that he did not get to witness the look on the Elder One's face before his dragon flapped off to safety (as the two of them seemed to hear while making their jump). It must have been rather comical - but, well, you cannot have everything.  
  
He cannot recall too clearly what happened immediately after they found themselves underground. All his mind has to offer are snatches of dense, blue-tinged murk, and memories of a sort of muffled silence, as though he had huge wads of cotton forced into his ears - which must have come from the thick blanket of snow that had covered everything on the surface. And also, an image of Issala's hands, large and warm, ripping long shreds off her jacket's lining and bandaging those of his wounds that his drained, exhausted self did not quite manage to heal. Or... Or trying to bandage his wounds, anyway: her motions were rapidly growing less and less accurate and coordinated; and her pupils had gotten stuck at mismatched sizes, one a tiny pinprick, the other an enormous inky circle, and did not quite react to the pulsing light of a little wisp he had managed to summon to illuminate their surroundings.  
  
And her speech - as she was muttering reassurances to him, that she was so relieved to see him alive, that everything was going to be all right, that they were going to find a way out and catch up with the Inquisition and show his injuries to another healer and take the cuffs off his hands - became increasingly slurred, until she made a tremendous gagging noise and moaned, barely moving her lips,  
  
'Me... Meraad... I... Can't... Can't see... Can't hear...'.  
  
'Meraad' was what she would call him sometimes (that, and 'Tevinter man' - a monicker left over from the days when they talked to one another in Minrathous). The word means 'tide' in the Qunari language - and Issala once described him as a man ready to wash all the world away in a devastating bloody tide for the sake of his child. Which is... not at all wrong. And rather flattering, in a morbid sort of way. Certainly more poetic than 'evil Vint'.  
  
'Meraad... I... I can't...' she gasped, sliding down the wall to the ice-crusted floor - and then fell silent, bobbing her head mindlessly from side to side, her gaze empty and her limbs limp.  
  
The mighty Herald, the saviour from the Fade - completely helpless. Trapped in an icy passageway, with a solid wall of snow between her and the sky; blind and deaf and lost, left at the mercy of her captured enemy.  
  
Who knows - under different circumstances, he may have gloated, dipping into the reserves of his finest Tevinter venom; and had something like this happened in Redcliffe, he would promptly have taken advantage of his quarry being in his power. But having come this far, having been tossed around in the crucible of Haven's destruction and then rescued (not for the first time, either) by his supposed enemy,  he reached to heal her instead, carefully removing the last splinters that were still dangling off her horns and examining the moist red spot on the crown of her head, where her copper hair hand gotten glued to her skull with blood.  
  
Harrowing as it looked, the wound did not run too deep - but Issala had still suffered from a blow on the head, just as he had during his dazed walzting around Haven. And, apparently, the side effect of that blow was the loss of most her senses - temporary, as he would later find out; but back then, he had no way of making sure, still far from being in the mint condition himself. All he could do was take a deep breath, summon his very last reserves of mana, let the rustling, silken ribbons of cool blue healing light encircle them both, and hope for the best.  
  
The spell did not return Issala's sight and hearing, not immediately - but it made her strong enough to stand, and him strong enough to support her and guide her steps.  
  
It may seem bizarre - it ought to seem bizarre! - but he was suddenly reminded of how he had once fished Dorian out of that brothel in the elven slums and steered him, drunk out of his wits and screaming tearful insults at someone only he alone could see, to his city home, where he made certain that the boy had a good, long sleep, a thorough bath, and an earnest conversation about his future. It was a bittersweet feeling, to be spirited back to a time when, instead of a monster descending upon the south and enslaving mage children, he had been a nurturing, supportive figure, akin to what Issala used to be among the Qunari, and what she remained as the Herald. In the dark by her side, he could be the shadow of the man Dorian still remembered him as, and mourned him as. A good man. A long-dead man.  
  
And thus, on they went, through the unending tunnels: the sightless Qunari and the ragged, gore-splattered prisoner that led her patiently from one confusing passageway crossing to another, allowing her to heap almost all of her bulk onto him and gently pulling at her fraying sleeve when the ceiling got too low and she needed to duck down. Sometimes, they would stumble upon packs of demons, which were still lurking about in the remote dark corners, their claws scraping sickeningly against the stone, even with the Breach recently closed. Issala had no way of telling that they were there - not by her sight and hearing, at any rate; buy she did sense the warmth and electric charge in the air when her mage companion began casting spells to push back the advancing creatures. And whenever that happened, she would grope about till her hand brushed against him, whispering something incoherent but audibly pleading.   
  
He would usually interpret that as a request to turn her towards the demons; when he complied and moved out of the way, she would extend her Marked hand forward, frowning in intense concentration, and release a spitting jet of bright green light, which would splash against the tunnel walls like acid and dissolve the demons into flakes of black ash.  
  
As she was unable to determine that the enemies had been vanquished (or, for that matter, behold the sheer scope of her own powers), he made a point of patting her forearm reassuringly after she was done, which would always bring a smile to her scarred face. That very smile which technically should not have anything special about it.  
  
It has taken them a while to navigate the dungeons - but now, the overwhelming array of this night's events has finally been brought to some manner of conclusion. They have emerged out of a cavernous crack in the mountainside - and a single step forward has resulted in him sinking up to his chin in a snow drift.  
  
A few moments after his head popped out of the blasted heap of those typically southern solidified water droplets, there was a sharp creak of snow under the heavy Qunari footfalls, and an already familiar grasp, locking round the collar of his robes.  
  
She has helped him  extricate himself from this embarrassing predicament - and now she is smiling at him again, her eyes widened and a bit dim, but with the same pupil size at last, and obviously capable of seeing him.  
  
'You are healing!' he exclaims, startled by the breadth of his own return grin.  
  
She knits her eyebrows and tilts her head - her hearing perhaps not quite there yet - and then sways, the shrilly whistling wind tugging violently at her half-torn clothing.  
  
'We may both need to find a place to rest,' he observes, almost swallowing a clump of wet snow the moment he opens his mouth. 'Maybe withdraw into the tunnels again and wait till morning? I am not at all thrilled by having to explore the lovely southern landscape in the dark, with this "snow" substance flying everywhere; and if the entire Inquisition has left Haven, its caravan has to be enormous and unwieldy, so we will not fall too far behind if we camp for the night'.  
  
He really does hope that his voice has not come out too high-pitched and begging: that would be humiliating. But he knows enough about healing (the natural consequence of caring for his son for so long) to see that Issala's recovery will go to the proverbial dogs if she does not rest. And he himself... he is not a young man; his mind and body have been tested beyond their limits tonight; and the thought of ploughing a path through all this snow - even if he melts some of it away with magic - makes him sick to the stomach. More than that: if Issala were to suddenly shed all of her calm geniality and snap at him to lay down and die if he wants to rest so much, he would have wholeheartedly supported the notion. It is always tempting to curl up in the cold and never wake up again...  
  
But, once more, dying will have to be put off. Issala intends to stay by his side.  
  
Having processed his words for a bit, she gives him a nod - and, pressing against each other under the bitter icy lashes of the storm, they head back in, not deep enough to lose sight of the exit.   
  
There is plenty of debris lying around to serve as fuel for a tiny campfire - lit up with a loud snap of the fingers, perhaps with a little too much flourish, but even a worn-out, bruised and wounded Tevinter, who keeps returning to thoughts of death at every turn, is a Tevinter still - as well as scraps of some ancient rags and the branches of a measly little fir tree by the tunnel's mouth for makeshift bedding.  
  
One would think that a magister would flail in disgust at the sheer notion of sleeping on the grimy floor, amid planks of wood and half-rotten animal carcasses and whatnot, surrounded by the thin, shaky lines of the wards his Qunari companion has suggested he draw, because, what do you know, her fresh-out-of-the-forest elven friend does that.  
  
But in actuality, the stint in Haven dungeons was not his first experience with primitive living conditions. When he was young and Full of Ideas (in writing, that would need to be ironically capitalized, because look where those Ideas led his political career), he would sometimes rub shoulders with the Soporati. And then there was that tacky dog lord castle in Redcliffe, too; he still holds a belief somewhere at the back of his mind that he did that Teagan fellow a service by ushering him out.  
  
So, yes, he can more than handle a little squalor. There is just one thing that truly bothers him when he lies down on the springy fir branches; the thing he has never quite been able to get used to in the south. The bloody cold.  
  
The sensation of something prickly and icy crawling underneath his rags and gnawing through skin and bone, has accompanied him through this entire misadventure, vanishing only when Haven was actually engulfed in dragon fire. And now that he is no longer on the move, this nasty tagalong takes over completely, sending ripples up his spine, as though there was a miriad of insects probing each of his bones and nerves and sinews with their tiny barbed legs.   
  
Muttering curses to himself in snatches of rasping Tevene, he bends his legs in the knee and presses them closer to his body, while keeping up attempts to conjure some mage fire, because that little speck of orange dancing over the scoop of debris he used for kindling is no longer enough...  
  
'Meraad,' Issala whispers to him, moving over from her flattened branch bed (which she has spread out at a respectful distance from him) and touching his shoulder. 'You are freezing. I will keep you warm'.  
  
'How?' he asks testily, slanting his eyes to look at her. 'Has your Mark suddenly acquired an ability to summon downy comforters?'    
  
Instead of giving him a spoken answer, she lays down behind his back and wraps her arms around him.  
  
'An older Tamassran who trained me once said: if you have nothing left to give, give away a part of yourself,' she murmurs. 'My body heat, in this case'.  
  
'Thank you,' he replies, his voice stifled, his cheeks and throat burning both with the thought that he must look insanely ridiculous, and with the sensation that this is actually... quite good... that the living warmth passing between the two of them is, in a way, more revitalizing than any of his magic.  
  
'I take care of people,' she says simply. 'Even long after leaving the Qun. I do not think I'd live with myself otherwise'.  
  
'And this includes your enemies?' he asks, his voice slowing down to a lazy drawl as the invisible insects leave him be and he slips into drowsy contentment.  
  
'I do not believe we are enemies now,' she points out, rubbing her cheek against the back of his neck.   
  
She must be just doing this because she is making herself comfortable; they are both sensible adults; not every situation where a man and a woman are so close to each other is bound to have... those specific results; she is merely trying to help him, sincerely, selflessly, beyond what he deserves - there is nothing more to it... Nothing... more...  
  
Issala goes on speaking, her voice thoughtful and rhythmic, while her cheek grows noticeably hotter against his skin (a fact that both of them choose to ignore).  
  
'First, I saved your life when you tried to ... do what you did in your cell; then, you repaid for that by standing between me and Cory... Cory-pheus; then, I saved your life again when I took you with me on my leap; then, you became my eyes and ears, and so saved me once more... And now we are saving each other from freezing to death. This is not something enemies do, I think...'  
  
No. This is not something enemies do. Especially not this last part.  
  
'I apologize,' he breathes out impulsively, not stopping to think that his current pose is not too fitting for something so solemn. 'For... For calling you a mistake'.  
  
'Oh'.  
  
Her embrace of him tightens - which must be why his eyes grow moist all of a sudden. Strangulating Qunari strength and all.  
  
'Don't think of it, Meraad. It is in the past now, just like our... enemy-ship'.  
  
He smirks to himself. Though since their meetings in Tevinter, her Trade Tongue has gotten almost fluent, she still makes a few slip-ups here and there.  
  
'I do not think that is a real word'.  
  
'Perhaps not,' she purrs, steadily growing as sleepy as he was before... before thoughts started coming to him. Thoughts of how being held close by a strong yet gentle woman would rather correspond to some of the fantasies that other, better man used to have, before he died, crushed by the news of what had happened to his wife - who may not have been too strong, not physically, but certainly was gentle (when she was not in her ferociously protective mother tigress mode). His amata... His most trusted friend and his cherished lover for thirty years... Surely, losing someone like this is the end of it all - the end of happiness, of love, of goodness? Surely, it cannot be possible to even begin caring the same way for anyone else, ever again?  
  
'Good night, Meraad,' Issala speaks up one last time after a pause, her voice almost a hum.  
  
'Good night, amica,' he replies, finally letting his eyelids slide together.  
  
When he floats off into the Fade, the spirits show him an almost laughably impossible vision of there being no more darkness on the horizon, and of the Inquisition welcoming him and Issala back without seizing him and locking him up again. A vision of Dorian shaking his hand and smiling through the tears of profound relief at seeing him alive; and of a face in the crowd that he keeps glimpsing out of the corner of his eye but is too afraid to look at directly, because its hazy, hard-to-grasp features painfully resemble Felix's, the way he looked like before his illness. As though... As though his boy is alive, cured, impatient to be reunited with his father - a good  man whose name he is proud to carry.  
  
Ah. The crazy, unrealistic figments of the Fade. How very amusing.


End file.
